


Stranger Things Have Happened Under a Full Moon

by Kacka



Series: Act Natural [1]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-27
Updated: 2016-02-27
Packaged: 2018-05-23 13:09:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6117442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kacka/pseuds/Kacka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bellamy has difficulty dealing with the fact that his little sister is a werewolf, but he's big enough to admit that he's probably taking it out on the wrong person.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stranger Things Have Happened Under a Full Moon

**Author's Note:**

> I've realized that my headcanon for Bellamy is that he's a giant nerd, so that's pretty much what you can expect here.

All in all, it’s worse than Bellamy ever imagined he could screw up.

When his mom died the summer after he graduated college, his biggest worry about looking out for Octavia had been that her tuition was stupid expensive and he was wary of her new boyfriend.

It’s not that he didn’t like Lincoln. Objectively, he knew Lincoln was a good guy and that he treated Octavia well. But things between them got very serious very quickly, and Bellamy, undergoing a lot of life changes all at once, desperately wished for a brake pedal. Typical older brother stuff.

He was never concerned that Lincoln was a werewolf, and would turn his sister into one, too.

“I’m losing my mind,” he says faintly, staring at his sister, who has indeed transformed into a wolf. She’s got light fur and bright eyes, and he wouldn’t believe it if he hadn’t watched her shift right in front of him.

She’d shown up that afternoon looking a little green and when he asked her if she was feeling okay, she’d sat him down and told him the whole thing from the beginning: that she’d found out a few weeks after Aurora passed that Lincoln is a werewolf, that she’d refused to let him break up with her, that one of his nephews had bitten her when she went to visit his family last weekend.

That she hadn’t wanted to hide it from Bellamy, so she’d talked Lincoln into giving her a wolfsbane injection, sickening her enough that she wouldn't be a threat so that she could show her brother. Make him believe her.

And then she’d grown fur and fangs and, well, that’s when he decided he was going crazy.

“Octavia?” He asks, and the wolf whimpers and curls up in a little ball of fur. She’s smaller than he ever pictured a werewolf to be, and if she looked ill before, she looks downright miserable now. On some instinctual level he knows that’s still his little sister, his responsibility, in there, so he puts his misgivings aside and crouches down to pet her carefully.

She whimpers again and crawls forward to put her head in his lap. He spends the next eight or so hours sitting there with her and trying not to freak out too much.

It doesn’t seem like she can really understand what he’s saying, but she appears to like the sound of his voice so he talks about work, which Octavia never lets him do, until he falls asleep.

When he wakes up, she’s still a wolf, and she’s staring at him expectantly.

“I want you to know I’m pissed at you and we’re going to have a very loud conversation about this when you turn back,” he says in his sternest big-brother voice, then gets up to make breakfast. By the time the pancakes are ready, she’s staggering into the kitchen, clothes rumpled and eyes bloodshot.

“Did I miss the part where you lecture me?” She asks, gratefully accepting a cup of water and some aspirin.

“Not even a little bit.”

As predicted, the fight is loud and lengthy, and ends only when one of their neighbors calls the cops to come settle a domestic disturbance. Luckily, they live in a small town and there are only a handful of people who work for the Sheriff's department. The deputy who answers the call is Bellamy’s friend Miller, who has diffused many a Blake blowout and lets them off with only a warning.

“Thanks, Nate,” Octavia says begrudgingly, arms crossed.

“Just don’t make me come back here in twenty minutes, okay? And get your friend Monty to come out with us next time. We’ll call it even.”

“Not a problem,” she assures him. He gives Bellamy a mocking little salute before leaving.

Once he’s gone, Bellamy collapses in a kitchen chair. His sleep hadn’t been restful, his life is turning inside out, and arguing with Octavia always takes it out of him. She deflates a little when she turns and sees him with his head in his hands.

“What’s done is done, Bell. There’s no point in breaking up with Lincoln now. You can't protect me from this one.”

“I don’t know how to not be upset, O.”

“That’s okay.”

“I wanted better for you than this.”

She sighs and wraps her arms around his middle like she used to when she was little and scared of the dark. He doesn’t figure she’s scared of that anymore.

“It doesn’t have to be a bad thing. It’s like getting my period, only it doesn’t last as long and honestly I’m probably crankier and more dangerous then than I will be on the full moon.”

Bellamy snorts because that logic actually does make him feel better. He’d learned to help her handle that because Aurora wasn’t around, freaked out only mildly about his preteen sister becoming a woman, and gotten help from a very kind woman at the grocery store about what kind of supplies Octavia needed. He’d learn how to handle this too.

And he does.

Over the course of the next month they talk about what it might mean for her daily life. He teases her about it because that's his default, and she scowls even though he thinks it's helping her feel better about the whole thing. Lincoln even starts hanging around more when Octavia is at Bellamy’s house, something he’d resisted before.

“If you guys are going to come over this much, maybe I should just install a doggy door,” Bellamy says dryly upon coming home with an armful of groceries to find that his sister had used her spare key to help herself to his Netflix account.

“This is why I keep my circle of people who know about me small.” Lincoln says.

‘Yeah,” Octavia says, words dripping with sarcasm. “The bad jokes are why.”

“That, and it’s a hard thing to hide from people you’re close to,” Lincoln grants with a small smile. It’s his Octavia smile. Bellamy rarely sees it in response to anything else. “She caught me taking wolfsbane a few moons ago and thought I was shooting up.”

Bellamy exchanges a look with his sister. He knows why that’s the first thing her mind jumped to. It would have been where his went first, too.

“Luckily, he’s not an addict,” Octavia says, her hand finding Lincoln’s. “Just a werewolf.”

“So you use wolfsbane every month?” Bellamy asks with interest. Octavia hadn’t been able to keep food down for almost twenty four hours after the last time. He doesn’t want to see his little sister suffer that way but he guesses it’s better than having a couple of uncontrollable werewolves on the loose.

“No. I used to, when I lived in the city, but it’s part of why I moved out here. I usually go pretty deep into the woods for a few days and it isn’t a problem.”

And Bellamy takes his word for it, believes that it really won’t be a problem. Lincoln’s got an air about him that makes Bellamy want to trust him, and he's done this enough that he probably knows what’s safest for everyone better than Bellamy does.

Unfortunately, neither of them count on Octavia.

When the next full moon rolls around, Bellamy has a hard time sleeping because he’s worried about his sister. As it turns out, Lincoln’s night is longer and more difficult. Octavia, as a new werewolf, is overwhelmed and overexcited by all the sights and sounds. He spends most of the night chasing her through the woods and then, when she’s too fast and goes too far, through town. Bellamy only finds this all out when the two of them show up dirty and naked at his door just as the sun is rising.

“Shit,” he says, squeezing his eyes shut and standing aside to let them in. If his neighbors caught sight of this, they’d probably think he was hosting some kind of weird early-morning orgy. “I did not want to see that. From either of you.”

Octavia heads straight back to grab some clothes that she keeps at his place while Lincoln shuts himself in Bellamy’s bathroom. She follows him in a few minutes later with some of Bellamy’s clothes to offer to her boyfriend.

“What happened?” He demands when they both emerge covered and embarrassed.

“Apparently I ran away from Lincoln,” Octavia says, setting her jaw and putting her ‘fight me’ face on.

“And you came here?”

“You live closer to town.” Lincoln sounds exhausted and Bellamy feels for him. As a toddler, Octavia wasn’t good at listening or standing still and he remembers running after her a lot then. Figures, as a rookie werewolf she’d be the same.

Bellamy is about to say something snarky when he’s interrupted by a knock on his door.

He frowns at his sister.

“Did someone follow you guys here?”

“No. Don’t blame us because you’re a hermit who doesn’t like to talk to people.”

“Who else would it be at this hour?” He grumbles, wrenching the door open and finding a blonde woman wearing a flannel shirt and rain boots that look like they were hurriedly pulled on over her pajamas. He doesn’t recognize her, which is strange in a town as small as this one. “Uh, can I help you?”

“I think you’re the one who needs help,” she says, frowning. “You were seen by at least five people last night. If you can’t keep your transformations under control–”

“Transformations?” He’s trying not to sound nervous, but he doesn’t really know how dangerous it is for someone else to find out about his sister. When he says this, he hears Lincoln get up from the couch and make his way to the door, which actually does make Bellamy feel better. He’s a little out of his depth with this whole supernatural creatures thing.

“Drop the act,” she says, crossing her arms over her chest. “If this is your first full moon, I can give you some tips–”

“Clarke?” Lincoln says, pulling Bellamy’s door open wider. Her hostile expression softens into one of surprise.

“Lincoln.”

“Sorry about last night,” he says, sheepish. Bellamy has never seen him sheepish before. It’s disconcerting. “You should come in. If that’s okay with Bellamy, I mean.”

“Uh–” Bellamy starts to say, but the blonde is already pushing past him.

“Or you can just bully your way inside,” Lincoln says, sounding amused and not half as annoyed as Bellamy is.

“I thought you had your transformations under control,” Clarke says, following Lincoln over to Bellamy’s couch.

“I do,” Lincoln says, sitting next to Octavia and taking her hand. “This is my girlfriend Octavia. It’s only her second full moon. The first month, we used wolfsbane, so I didn’t know what to expect last night.”

Clarke studies his sister, inscrutable, and Bellamy moves to stand behind her in solidarity. He doesn’t like people treating Octavia like she’s a problem. He never has.

“It’s nice to meet you,” Clarke says finally, extending a hand. “Clarke Griffin. I’m a liaison for the mayor’s office. It’s pretty much my job to make sure the humans in town stay safe and the supernatural world stays a secret.”

“Cool gig,” Octavia says, impressed.

“Yeah,” Clarke laughs, and Octavia relaxes visibly. Bellamy remains wary. “My mom is a low-level witch with a high-level position in the human world. Her magic is mostly just healing potions and spells, but when Mayor Jaha found out he decided he needed to hire someone to make sure two communities can coexist without anybody getting hurt.” Her face grows more serious. “Did you ask Lincoln to turn you? Was it voluntary?”

“I wasn’t the one who bit her,” Lincoln says carefully. “But no, it wasn’t voluntary.”

Clarke sighs.

“Who bit her, then?”

“My sister’s kid. They don’t live in Arcadia Falls, or I would have contacted you when it happened.”

“One less thing for me to worry about,” she says, flashing a smile. Her eyes flicker up to meet Bellamy’s. “Are you a werewolf too, or are you just offering them sanctuary?”

“The second one, I guess.”

She nods, businesslike.

“Okay. Then there are rules I’ll have to go over with you about who you can and can’t tell, what your rights are, resources to help you deal with this kind of thing. But I’ll get to that in a minute.” She looks back to Octavia. “First we need to deal with you.”

“Deal with her?” Bellamy asks, his temper flaring. It rankles, how prepared and self-assured she is in the face of all this weirdness, when he still feels like his life has turned upside down. “What does that mean?”

“Calm down, Bell,” Octavia chastens. “Or we’ll have this conversation without you.”

“I’m just trying–”

“I don’t want to hurt anybody,” she snaps. “If Clarke can make sure people are safe from me, then I want to hear what she has to say.”

He nods and stalks off to the kitchen to fume on his own until he can get himself under control. The pot of coffee he brews is finishing up when there’s a sound behind him. He whirls around to find Clarke standing in the doorway.

“What do you want?”

Her temper doesn’t rise to meet his and it’s as infuriating as it is impressive.

“I wanted to tell you I’m heading out because I have work and,” she pauses to look down at her outfit pointedly, “I’m not really dressed for it. But there are still things you and I have to go over, legal contracts I need you to sign, so I’m leaving you my card.”

“Your card?” He repeats dumbly.

“Business card,” she clarifies unnecessarily, then smirks and adds, “Little rectangular piece of paper with my phone number on it? You can call later today and set up an appointment.”

“Gee, can’t wait.”

She slides the card on the counter then turns to leave. He thinks he hears her mumble, “Leave it to humans to be the difficult ones,” as she goes, but he can’t be sure.

It comes as a surprise to no one that he doesn’t call her.

He does apologize to his sister, in the form of takeout from her favorite restaurant, and to Lincoln for having to put up with Octavia’s antics, in the form of a leash and collar. Octavia throws a pillow at him, and then another at Lincoln when he laughs.

He’s not expecting Clarke Griffin to make much trouble for him, but apparently he doesn’t know her very well because she shows up at the local bar with his friends (Monty included, as promised to Miller) and slaps a folder down on the table in front of him.

“What a weird coincidence, running into you when you happen to have your documents handy,” he deadpans, scooting quickly into the booth when she starts to wedge herself in next to him.

Her hair is less unkempt, her clothing more appropriate for being out of the house than it was a few mornings ago. She looks all around more put together, but he’s not sure he thinks she looks _better._ There was something real and earnest in the way she’d clearly bolted out of bed to help someone else manage their crisis.

“Lincoln invited me,” she says, unwinding her scarf. “It’s not a coincidence. It can still be weird though, if you try really hard and believe in yourself.”

“You’re so inspirational.”

“That is my reputation,” she says, holding out a pen expectantly.

“Don’t I get to at least read these first?” He asks, glancing at the papers in the folder.

“I can go through them with you, if you want. They’re pretty basic: a health waiver for injuries related to your sister’s condition, an NDA, a couple of forms that officially allow your sister and Lincoln to transition on your property. Those are the big things.”

“Still,” he says, sliding the folder into his bag. “I’m not one to just take someone’s word for it. Especially not someone in politics. I’ll take a look at these and let you know if I have further questions or concerns.”

Clarke looks like she’s restraining an eye roll. Bellamy can’t blame her. He knows he’s being intentionally difficult, but something about her just rubs him the wrong way.

“You’re the kind of person who reads the Terms & Conditions page, aren’t you?”

“No comment,” Bellamy says, at the same time as Octavia chimes in, “He absolutely is.” He glares at her but she ignores him in favor of introducing Clarke around. If he spends the rest of the night sulking, it’s only because everyone else takes to her so quickly. To be fair, she seems personable and pretty cool but he’s dug himself into this grudge now and he’s not giving up ground that easily.

He has no intentions of seeking her out to return the documents, so he can’t really find it in himself to be surprised when she shows up at his house a few days later.

“I’ve given you ample time to look through the documents,” she says, pushing past him and into his house just like she had the other day. “If you still have questions, I would be more than happy to walk you through everything. But I really need those documents back.”

“You can’t just come over with no warning and force me to let you inside.”

“I don’t have your number and you’re not calling me back.”

“I’ve been busy.”

“Look, Bellamy. Let’s be straight with each other.” Her eyebrows are drawn together in a frankly terrifying glare, and even though she’s a couple of inches shorter than he is, he finds himself quite intimidated.

“You’re screwing with my ability to do my job well,” she continues, “with my ability to protect both the supernatural and the human community, just because you don’t like me. If it weren’t unprofessional of me to call you immature–”

“You’re right,” he cuts her off, not wanting to hear her opinion of him any further. “All the papers are there somewhere,” he says, gesturing to a stack next to his laptop. He actually did look at them, he just never planned to do anything about it. “I’ll sign them and you won’t have to deal with me again. Just give me one second.”

He disappears to his bedroom to grab the pamphlet she’d slipped in among the forms. It’s titled, _So your loved one is a werewolf,_ and it’s full of information, resources, and little doodles of him and Octavia and even Lincoln. It’s obvious she put it together after their conversation that first morning, and it had begun to soften him towards her even before she pointed out he was acting like a jerk.

“I had a question about–” he breaks off when he reenters the living room to find her reading over one of the papers in the stack, looking completely at home on his couch.

“What is this?” She asks, waving the paper at him.

Upon closer inspection, it’s part of an interview that he’d printed out to edit.

“That’s just something for work,” he says dismissively, but she butts in before he can change the subject back to the pamphlet.

“But what is it?”

“I’m working on compiling a history of the area. The Historical Preservation Society is paying me to do the research legwork, but I’ve been working on writing up my findings in hopes that they’ll just publish me instead of handing my data over to someone else.”

It’s uncomfortable for him to share this because he hasn’t told anyone about it yet. He doesn’t actually get to complete many sentences related to work around his friends; they interrupt with feigned snoring when he’s about halfway through.

“This is really good,” she says, animated, looking up at him with excitement in her eyes.

“Thanks.” He pauses. “Anyway–”

“No, I mean it. It’s informative without being dry, it’s interesting and well-thought out–”

“How much of it did you read?” He asks, sitting next to her to peek over her shoulder.

“What if I said I might have a commission for you?” He blinks at her.

“I would tell you that I already have a job,” he says slowly, uncertainly. She grins.

“Yeah, but you’re going to be in nerd heaven when you see this. Come on, I’ll drive.”

She brings the papers in the car with them and talks him through each one, watching for his signature and initials as needed. When she parks in front of the public library, he goes from intrigued to disappointed in a few seconds flat.

“No offense, but this is one of the worst-curated libraries in the state,” he says, and she snorts. He follows her out of the car mostly because he isn’t sure what else to do.

“Do you actually have a mental ranking of all the libraries in the state?” She asks as he holds the door open for her.

“Sadly, no. I’m just assuming.”

Clarke waves at the librarian behind the desk and slips into a section Bellamy is pretty sure is for employees only. To his confusion, she heads straight for a bookshelf full of items waiting to be catalogued. Maybe she’s going to show him a book? Maybe something about the history of the state that she just happened to notice last time she and the librarian were hanging out?

She does move to pull a book down from the shelf, but instead of falling into her hands the entire shelf swings outward into the room with a groan and Bellamy feels his jaw drop.

“Is that an actual, literal secret room behind a bookshelf?”

“That’s not even the best part,” she smirks, gesturing for him to enter ahead of her. He descends a set of stairs to find himself in the dark as she swings the bookshelf closed behind them.

“Did you bring me here to murder me because it took me so long to get the forms back to you?”

“I thought about it.” There’s a sound like the flip of a switch and then the room is bathed in a soft yellow light, revealing–

“It’s a library,” he says, aiming to sound more impressed than he actually is. The room is almost as large as the regular library upstairs, but it feels more atmospheric with sturdy wooden shelves and tomes lining the shelves that look centuries old.

“Welcome to the reason supernatural creatures flock to Arcadia Falls,” Clarke says, pulling a hefty volume off the nearest shelf and handing it to him. It’s titled _Encyclopaedia of the Non-Natural World,_ and it’s filled with anatomically precise drawings and maps and tiny hand lettering.

“This section here is mostly collected knowledge from over the millennia,” she says, pointing to the shelf she took the book from. “In the back, there are drawings and photographs as well as spellbooks and potion recipes. This whole wall is journals and firsthand accounts. It’s a researcher’s wet dream.”

He’s gaping again.

“I would kill for these kinds of resources with my regional project.”

“It’s the largest collection of its kind in the world,” she says proudly, sitting down in a red plush chair and hugging a book to her chest. “My dad’s side of the family has curated it for generations. He chose to leave the family business and get an engineering degree in the human world, so he didn’t add much to it. I inherited it when he passed away a few years ago, and I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with it ever since.”

Bellamy sits carefully in another chair. They look kind of old and he’s not sure how well they’ll support his weight.

“And you want to hire me to do… what, exactly?”

“You tell me,” Clarke shrugs. “What would you do if you had unlimited access to this place? If your job was just to be the librarian, to cultivate the knowledge of our day for future generations?”

Bellamy feels himself start to smile as he thinks it over.

“Yeah,” Clarke says, snapping him out of it. “That’s what I thought.”

* * *

Bellamy starts spending several nights a week in the library, poring over old texts, digging deep into the culture and history of the supernatural world. It quickly takes over the forefront of his thoughts. He’d been mostly done with his other project, but was delaying the finish because he didn’t want to get reassigned and have to move away from his sister.

While he’s working Clarke will usually wander in at some point and curl up with one of the leather-bound journals and her sketchbook. They don’t speak much, but when they do it’s likely because Bellamy has reacted aloud to something he’s reading and Clarke is teasing him about it.

One night she lets several of his exclamations pass before he notices. When he looks up, she’s biting her lip and holding the sketchbook very close to her face as she works to get some detail just right.

Bellamy gets up and wanders over to where she’s sitting.

“Can I see what you’re working on?” He asks, coming up right next to her. She jumps, as if he made a sneaky approach, and he tries to hold in the laugh at how adorable she looks with her blue eyes wide open and streaks of charcoal on her face.

“Uh– sure,” she says, handing it over for his inspection. It’s a very detailed drawing of what he imagines a fairy’s wings would look like. Bellamy wouldn’t be surprised if they lifted off the page and started to fly away, something about them feels so real.

“Your mom is a witch, right?” He asks, pulling his glasses out of his shirt pocket so he can see the drawing better.

“Huh?” She asks, and he forces his eyes away from the page and to her face (it’s not that difficult; as incredible as her drawing is, her face is still way better to look at) to find her staring at him.

“Your mom?” He prompts, unsure where he lost her.

“Oh. Yeah.”

“Did you inherit any of her powers?”

“Those abilities are like eighty percent learned,” she says. “Why do you ask?”

“I would swear there’s magic in this,” he says, indicating the sketchbook. His eyes are still on her face and he can almost pinpoint the moment her cheeks flood with red. “I’m serious. It’s so lifelike.”

“You’ve never even seen a fairy.”

He shrugs and hands the book back to her.

“Now I don’t need to.”

She closes the book and stretches, patting the chair next to her in an invitation.

“Have you decided what you’re going to do with this wealth of information?”

“I’ve at least decided where I want to start,” he says, pushing his sleeves up. “These writings are great resources for me to learn about individual species, but they don’t do much to cover interspecies communities and they’re largely written by and for humans.”

She nods thoughtfully.

“You want to conduct interviews.”

“If anyone is willing to meet with me. At the very least, I think I can convince my sister and her boyfriend.”

“I can help you out,” she offers, and even though they’ve been getting along recently it’s still a surprise when he thinks of his initial loathing for her.

“I was going to ask,” he admits. “I don’t even know who’s who in this town anymore. And now that I’ve seen these–” he taps the closed sketchbook and revels in her blush again, “–I think you should be a full partner on the project. Ten percent credit, at least.”

“Fifty or nothing,” she shoots back, but she looks pleased and he is too.

“Fine.”

* * *

The first interview Clarke sets up for him is with a dragon named Raven, and she insists upon sitting in on the interaction.

“It’ll either be hate or lust at first sight,” she explains. “Or both. I don’t trust either of you to actually get this interview done without a mediator.”

“That hurts,” he says, clutching his chest in mock offense. He wants to add that he hasn’t really been interested in seeing anyone who isn’t a tiny, blonde supernatural liaison in the past few weeks, but doesn’t think that will go over well.

It turns out that Clarke’s predictions are fairly accurate, if you don’t count his current romantic preferences. Raven is exactly his type: a gorgeous spitfire (though he keeps that particular pun to himself lest he finds out the hard way that she actually _can_ spit fire). She seems less than impressed with him.

“This is the nerd you’ve been telling me about, then,” she says to Clarke, judgment plain on her face.

“Yeah, this is Bellamy. His sister is a werewolf.”

“I’m glad ‘nerd with the werewolf sister’ is my identifier now.”

“‘Nerd with big brother issues’ just doesn’t fully cover it anymore,” Clarke says, patting him on the shoulder. It’s the first time she’s done anything like that, and as fleeting as it is, he feels like he’s been burned where they came into contact.

Raven smirks like she knows what he’s thinking, which– he’s not one hundred percent sure what being a dragon entails, so maybe she does.

“There are worse things to be known for,” Raven tells him, and he nods, remembering his father, remembering his mother.

The interview spans a few sittings, over the course of which Raven becomes increasingly friendlier toward him. Once she leans into the fact that he’s not trying to exploit her or Clarke, into the novelty that she can actually tell him lots of stories that seem mundane to her but enthrall him, she even seems to enjoy their time. By the end of the week he’s got a load of excellent, relevant information, and equally as much trash talking and unrelated anecdotes.

Clarke’s comments are interspersed throughout, reminding Raven of details she forgot and correcting her when the stories get too exaggerated. It’s clear they’re close friends, confirmed when Raven mentions that she only moved to Arcadia Falls so she could stay near Clarke after college.

“Everywhere needs a good mechanic,” she shrugs, self-deprecatingly. “Not everywhere has a supernatural community with a voice in the government. Or a best friend who knows and accepts me for the beast I am.”

“You are a beast,” Clarke says, almost an automatic response. She doesn’t really seem like she’s paying attention; she’s been drawing Raven’s tail, apparently from memory, for the past hour or so. “Especially in the bedroom. Or the garage. Or at drinking games. You have many talents.”

“Thanks,” Raven snorts. Bellamy’s ears have gone hot but he’s trying to remain professional.

He thinks Raven notices anyway. She blessedly does not comment on it.

Next up in the interview process are a couple of gremlins and a wood nymph. He’s surprised when he shows up at the library to find Octavia’s friend Monty sitting next to a lanky boy wearing goggles and holding a potted plant.

“Bellamy,” Monty says, nerves pitching his voice higher than normal. “What are you–”

“Oh good, you’re here,” Clarke says, dragging over one too many chairs.

“You guys should get an Oscar,” Bellamy tells her, smirking at Monty. “I had no idea that you two knew each other when Octavia introduced you that night at the bar.”

“You won’t tell Miller, will you?” Monty asks, a little desperate.

“It’s not my secret to share,” Bellamy shrugs. “I’m going to assume you’ll figure out how to tell him if you guys get serious enough.”

“Thanks,” Monty says, deflating.

“I’m Bellamy, by the way. What’s with the bonzai?” Bellamy asks, nodding at the other guy.

“Jasper Jordan. This is Maya,” he says, introducing the tree. Bellamy is about to look at Clarke to ask if Jasper is entirely in his right mind when a girl materializes _out of the tree_ and takes the vacant seat to Jasper’s left.

“Wood nymph,” Clarke says, elbowing him in the side.

“Right.” He clears his throat. He watched his baby sister turn into a wolf two months ago. He’s handled weirder things than this. Maybe. “Let’s get started.”

Bellamy had never formed much of a picture for how gremlins are supposed to look and act, but Monty and Jasper are surprisingly mild in comparison to what he’d been anticipating. Instead of evil little beings who thrive on chaos, he finds them to be lighthearted pranksters who have learned, the hard way, where to draw the line.

Maya, as it turns out, can’t be far from the tree she has linked herself to. Bellamy admires her ingenuity with the whole bonzai situation. She and Jasper are taken with each other, according to Clarke, and moved to Arcadia Falls so they could be in an open interspecies relationship without fear of being ostracized.

Gremlins form strong bonds, they explain, and Monty had moved alongside his friend with few reservations. Fewer still, when he met Miller.

Raven keeps them supplied with old machines they can break down and put back together, and Jasper in particular has grown to be good friends with her. It gives Bellamy all sorts of new insights into interspecies dynamics and he geeks out just obviously enough that Clarke makes fun of him about it for days on end.

At this point, another full moon has come and gone. Octavia is still running rampant, Lincoln chasing her all over town. Bellamy even walks in on them one day while they’re having a serious conversation about tempering the wolfsbane so it’s less potent.

It bothers him to think that his sister would have to resort to sickening herself every month, and after a few moody nights at the library Clarke confronts him about it.

“It wouldn’t have to be forever,” she says, after he’s explained the situation to her. “She could wean herself off of it once she got her were-self under control.”

“Is that even possible?” Bellamy asks. The first thing he’d done in the library was track down all the accounts of werewolfism. They mentioned mostly how to fight werewolves or how to protect themselves against one. They said disturbingly little about how to manage transitions.

“Oh, for sure. It’s just going to be harder for her since she was made a werewolf, and not born into it.” They’re both quiet for a moment, reflecting, and then she says, “It would also probably help if she had an alpha she had to answer to.”

“An alpha?”

Clarke sighs, world-weary and long, and it makes whatever she’s about to say feel weighty.

“I’ve seen what happens when an alpha werewolf asserts dominance over the members of its pack. It’s– awful. To see someone so clearly losing the fight against their will. But it does make packs safer for the humans around them, and usually less savage toward each other.”

“How did you get to see that?” Bellamy asks.

“My ex-girlfriend is an alpha,” Clarke says, her voice unreadable. “I have a lot of respect for her, but the alpha power still doesn’t sit right with me.”

She sounds off, so Bellamy lets the conversation fizzle. He realizes it’s not just Clarke’s romantic history making her touchy when he asks Lincoln about his experiences with alphas and the normally easygoing man frowns, every muscle in his body tensing.

“Why do you ask?”

Bellamy shrugs, trying to play it off. If both Clarke and Lincoln are this uncomfortable with the mere mention of an alpha, it’s not a suggestion he wants to propose for his sister.

“The records on werewolves are spotty at best. I’m trying to understand the differences in dynamics between members of the same species and members of different species. Just wondering if you had any insight.”

“What do you know about alphas already?” Lincoln asks, trying to flatten his face into a joking smirk. “And don’t cite Animal Planet.”

“Only that they have some measure of control over their pack. Clarke is the only decent source on the topic in that whole library, and she didn’t seem to want to talk about it much.”

Lincoln’s face grows serious again.

“What did she say?”

“Just that she dated an alpha once.”

“She didn’t just date an alpha,” Lincoln says, moving his jacket off the seat next to him so Octavia can fit herself in against his side. “She dated the alpha of the alphas.”

“So you know her ex?”

Octavia rolls her eyes at this.

“Are you seriously interrogating my boyfriend about Clarke’s romantic history? Go be weird at her instead of at us.”

“Just for that, you don’t get any of my chili fries,” he says, yanking his basket back when she predictably makes a grab for them. “And this is very important research.”

“Sure it is.”

“I’ve met Lexa a few times,” Lincoln says, steering the conversation away from Bellamy’s love life, or lack thereof. “My Aunt Indra is the alpha over our family, but she ultimately answers to the Commander.”

Bellamy feels a little bit intimidated that Clarke’s ex is casually referred to as ‘the Commander,’ but he rationalizes it by telling himself that things clearly did not last between them and that maybe Clarke will go for someone more low key next time around.

Lincoln is still on the idea of alphas, looking down at O with reluctance in his eyes.

“If you’re opposed to the wolfsbane plan, we can always ask my Aunt to help out,” he offers.

“Do you think she could?” Octavia asks, looking between him and Bellamy. It’s kind of gratifying for him that this position at the library has allowed him to remain one of his sister’s go-to people for informed decision-making.

“It’s worth asking,” Lincoln answers. “I don’t want to join a pack, but if you can’t control your transitions–”

“I wouldn’t make you do that.”

“I know,” he says, smiling his Octavia smile and kissing her temple. “But I’d do it anyway.”

* * *

Aside from the werewolves, the only people left to interview are the town’s resident warlocks. The first few interviews are easy, the warlocks willing to answer most questions he asks, but providing little in the way of new information.

“They’re more human than the others,” Clarke shrugs. “What they are, they’ve chosen to become through hard work. They can just as easily choose not to use their magic, and to live like normal human beings. I wasn’t expecting huge revelations.”

“Yeah, but I don’t know where to go next,” he points out. “If the warlocks can’t give me anything useful, I’m out of people to interview. Except for Lincoln and O.”

This makes her pause in her shading, setting her sketchbook on her lap in a move that means she’s about to make an unpopular suggestion.

“Don’t freak out–”

“Then don’t start sentences with, ‘don’t freak out.’”

“There is one more warlock you can talk to. A witch, actually.”

It takes him a minute.

“Your mother?” Clarke mentions her dad all the time, but her mom is more elusive in her stories. He doesn’t think there’s bad blood between them, but he’s gotten the sense that they’re not as close as they were before Clarke took the job as Mayor Jaha’s liaison. Bellamy doesn’t understand it. He’d think her mom would be proud.

“The one and only Abby Griffin.”

“Is it going to be weird for you to be there?”

“It shouldn’t be,” she says, shrugging one shoulder. Her sketchbook tips forward and he’s stunned to see that she’s been drawing _him_. He barely gets a flash of it before she readjusts and he can’t see anymore, but it was definitely his profile. He’d know it anywhere.

“I love my mom,” she continues, and he tries to remember what they’d been talking about. “She just doesn’t agree with a lot of my choices, and that’s been– hard. I didn’t follow her footsteps in healing magic, but I also didn’t follow my dad and completely detach my profession from the supernatural world. She doesn’t understand it.”

She’s staring at her drawing, but vacantly, like she’s not really looking at it so much as through it. It twists something in him to see her so dejected.

“Are you happy with your life?” He asks. Her head snaps up and she gives him a tiny, fragile smile.

“I am. I like my job. I have good friends. I’m even figuring out what to do with the library–”

“You’re welcome.”

“I think she’ll be happy for me if she can ever see how happy I am.”

“And you’d be happier if she was happy for you.”

Her smile is stronger, but more rueful.

“Parents, huh?”

“You can say that again.”

* * *

Abby Griffin is twice as terrifying as anyone else he’s interviewed, even Raven, who he was afraid at first would set him on fire. It has less to do with her magic, which Clarke insists is for healing only, and more to do with the fact that she’s his– she’s Clarke’s mother.

“Are you sure you want to be here for this?” Bellamy asks as Clarke straightens her cup of pencils for the sixth time in the past two minutes. Not that he’s counting.

“Why do you keep asking me that?”

“Because your anxiety is contagious,” he says, placing his hand over hers to still it. She grips his fingers and even though it’s kind of an awkward position, he thinks it’s helping calm her down. “And you know this project is about interspecies relationships, which means–”

“It means you’re going to ask about my dad.”

“Yeah.”

“I can handle it, Bellamy.”

“I’m not saying you can’t.” He pauses, trying to frame it delicately. “But you being here is going to make this conversation harder for everyone. Your mom is going to frame her answers differently, I’m going to have a harder time treating her like I would any other interview subject, and it might be all kinds of difficult for you. You’re going to skew my data. My data is very important to me, Clarke.”

She scoffs and he starts stroking the back of her hand with his thumb to let her know he didn’t mean it.

“I still want to listen to the recording later on.”

“Obviously.”

The interview goes much better than he expected. Abby seems uncomfortable at first, just being back in the library, in her dead husband’s space, but Bellamy instinctively fixes her the same kind of tea Clarke keeps on hand and it helps the older woman relax.

She’s friendly but not overly so, asking interested questions about his work, supernatural and non-supernatural, about his sister, and about his friendship with Clarke. Having read many of the journals in the library, herself, she has some idea of what kind of information Bellamy is looking for and offers plenty of helpful insights. She’s open not only about her relationship with Jake but also her relationship with Clarke, her friendship with the Mayor, and the ways she’s had to navigate tricky situations with her patients.

All the same, he’s glad it’s over in one sitting.

He’s really looking forward to taking the evening off but when he gets home Clarke is sitting on his porch, her nose and cheeks red from the cold in a way that makes his stomach twist. She’s huddled small, hands clasped around her knees, holding them to her chest. He’s not used to seeing her this small. Her presence usually makes her feel bigger than she is.

“I didn’t want to wait to listen to it,” she says, accepting the hand he offers to pull her up. Her fingers are like ice, yet his instinct is to grip them tighter, not to let them go.

“Yeah, but if you freeze to death you’d never get to hear,” he complains, dropping her hand to let them into the warm house. “Go sit on your hands or something. There are blankets on the couch.”

“I’m an adult, Bellamy.” She’s still smiling at him though, whereas by this point Octavia would be saying the same thing with far less amusement.

“Adults can get hypothermia too, Clarke.”

She grins and goes into the living room. By the time he’s dug the tape recorder out of his bag she’s bundled herself in blankets like a burrito.

“Are you sure you’re an adult?” He teases her, placing the headphones carefully over her ears and tucking the recorder down into her wrappings. He moves into the kitchen to give her some privacy, switching on his radio and humming along as he starts to make his dinner.

Almost an hour later she wanders in, still clutching the blankets tightly, and leans against his side as he aimlessly pokes at the chicken in his pan. His arm comes around her. It’s the most natural thing in the world.

“That was fast.”

“I ran it forward until I got to the part I cared about,” she tells him. “I’ll listen to the rest later.”

“You okay?”

“I think so.” She’s quiet as he flips the burner off and carries their food back to the couch, following him with tiny steps. “Sorry if I messed up your night.”

“Don’t worry. My plan was to finish reading the first _Game of Thrones_ novel, so it’s not like I wasn’t prepared for an emotionally turbulent evening.”

This makes her laugh and he wonders if she knows he only started reading it because Raven kept calling Clarke ‘Khaleesi’ when she thought she was being too bossy.

“Have you watched any of the show?” She tucks her feet under his legs but they’re still freezing so he lets her.

“I don’t have HBO,” he replies.

“I do.”

“Way to brag.”

“Ass,” she wiggles her toes in retribution. “I meant we could watch it on my account. Online.”

“I guess that is more of a two-person activity than reading.”

It’s just plain _nice_ to spend time with her like this. She eggs him on when he grumbles about the show not lining up with his imagination, plays devil’s advocate sometimes, and just generally makes the whole experience more fun.

“I can’t wait till we get into the later seasons and you see how much they start to deviate from the books,” she says after two episodes. She sounds positively giddy.

“We?” He echoes. “Doesn’t this show have, like, a lot of seasons already? That’s a pretty big commitment you’re making.”

“What, you think you’re going to get tired of me?”

There’s a playful look in her eye and he wants to kiss her so badly.

“Definitely not,” he says, a little thrill running through him when she moves to hide her smile in his shoulder.

“That’s good, because I was thinking maybe we could start seeing more of each other.”

He sort of nudges her face with his arm so she’ll pull back and he can get a good look at her face. Defiant is the only word he can come up with to describe her expression, as if she’s prepared to fight him on this. As if there were some scenario in which he’d say no to that.

“Are you asking me out on a date?”

“No,” she blushes, looking down at her lap. She’s released her hold on the blankets over the past few hours, so he can actually reach over and take hold of one of her hands without too much embarrassing rooting around for it.

“You _like_ me.”

“Shut up, I do not.”

“You want to _date_ me.”

“I have no idea why.”

“Me either,” he says, unable to scrape the stupid smile off his face. “I’m pretty lucky like that.”

* * *

They’re still on his couch, a little preoccupied, when they’re startled apart by something slamming against his front door with great force. He thinks he imagined it at first, thinks maybe some ad on his laptop just started making noise, or that there’s another explanation, but then it happens again, is followed by a splintering sound, and then his living room is flooded with werewolves.

The first one through the door is unmistakably Octavia. He thinks even if he hadn’t spent an entire night with her wolfy head in his lap, something within him would still be able to feel that it’s his sister.

There’s a giant, slightly darker wolf hot on her heels, claws clacking against the floorboards as it scrambles to catch up with her. He assumes it’s Lincoln, though he has no idea who the third, midnight-black wolf is that follows them both.

He kind of shuffles in front of Clarke, who is surprisingly calm. Given who her ex-girlfriend is, it shouldn't be so surprising, but his mind is pretty focused on the dangerous animals in front of him.

Octavia stalks straight up to him, all fangs and growling, and Lincoln paces behind her, seemingly torn about how to get between them or drag her away without injuring anybody. The unknown third wolf looks ready to rip someone’s, anyone’s, throat out.

This is his life now. Deciphering the body language of mythical creatures.

There’s a frightening moment when he’s not sure whether Octavia is going to attack or not. She looks totally bloodthirsty but he can’t make himself believe she’d kill him. If anything, he’s relying on the fact that if he knows it’s her, she has to know, somewhere inside, who he is too.

So he does what he normally does in a tense situation: he pretends he’s not scared and uses humor to deflect.

“My, sis, what big teeth you have.”

A beat passes, and he thinks it hasn't worked, but then she exhales one huge, gross-smelling breath in his face, a sound analogous to her human huffs when she’s one thousand percent done with him. He can almost picture her eyes rolling as she turns away from him and curls up on his hearth.

Lincoln is comically confused, looking between Bellamy, the other wolf, and his girlfriend with a bewildered expression. When Octavia yips menacingly at him, he gives what looks almost like a shrug and curls around her.

“I can’t believe that worked,” Clarke whispers as the dark wolf slinks out the door and disappears immediately into the night.

“I get that feeling a lot.” It’s only just now hitting him that having three werewolves in his face could have gone really, really badly for him. Clarke can apparently feel the change in mood and slides her hand down his arm, pulling him up and back to his bedroom.

“Presumptuous,” he teases, though it comes out sounding kind of hollow.

“Are you okay?” She asks once they’re away from prying ears.

“I will be. Once I get a new front door and my blood pressure drops back to normal.”

She nods and tucks herself back under his arm, rolling into his side as he lays them back on the bed. It should feel fast, should feel new, but more than anything it just feels comforting to have her in his arms, real and solid.

“I didn’t even remember it was a full moon today,” he confides. “I should have been paying more attention.”

“Your sister is going to be fine,” Clarke tells him, smoothing her hand over his side.

“How do you know?”

“Werewolves are full of fight, Bellamy. Their way is to kill or be killed, but she chose to stand by her blood instead of spilling yours. I don’t know if you realize how huge that is.”

He looks down at her, the moonlight making her eyes and hair more pale, her features more angelic.

“You really think she’s going to be okay?”

She smiles up at him, and he realizes with a jolt how much he trusts her.

“She’s going to be incredible."

* * *

He wakes before anyone else to a cold breeze blowing through the gaping hole in the front of his house. Slipping out from under the covers, he tucks them more intentionally around Clarke’s sleeping form and layers himself in his warmest clothes so he can venture to the kitchen.

He’s scrounging up ingredients for blueberry waffles, his sister’s favorite, when he senses her behind him.

“I thought wolves were supposed to huff and puff the house down, not bust through solid wood,” he says without turning around, flinching when she flicks his ear and reaches around him to scoop up a handful of blueberries.

“Sorry, big brother. I’ll pay to get it fixed.” She hoists herself up onto the counter, watching as he measures ingredients. “So you and Clarke, huh?” She says, poking him with her foot.

“Yup. You called it.”

“I totally did,” she grins. “Did you see where Lincoln’s aunt took off to?”

“Oh, is that who that was? No, she just peaced out after you didn’t eat me. I think she was disappointed, to be honest.”

“Like I’d want to eat you,” Octavia scoffs. “You probably taste disgusting.”

“Well, that takes a load off my mind. Now are you going to be unhelpful or are you going to get out the waffle iron?”

The two of them make a truly inadvisable number of waffles before he hears the low tones of Clarke and Lincoln chatting drift in from the living room. He’s smug to see that she’s pulled on one of his sweatshirts over the previous day’s clothes. He might even let her keep it.

“You’re such a provider,” she teases when he sets the mountain of waffles down in front of her.

“Okay, I’m happy for you both, but can you please save your flirting for when I’m not around?” Octavia gripes.

“Like you and Lincoln were ever that considerate for me,” Bellamy snorts. Lincoln steals the syrup from his hands and he’s about to make another comment when a voice at the door says, “I hate to interrupt–”

It’s a short, dark-skinned woman who looks like she can really pack a punch. When Lincoln clears his throat and stands formally, Bellamy figures it’s probably his infamous Aunt Indra.

“We should speak outside,” he says, holding a hand out for Octavia.

“That won’t be necessary,” Indra says, holding a hand up to stop him. “It looks as if I’m no longer needed here. Octavia did admirably last night. I must return to my pack, but before I leave, I wanted to extend one last formal invitation for the two of you to join us.”

Lincoln and Octavia exchange glances, and then Octavia stands as well. Bellamy’s heart is in his throat. He loves his little sister, wants what’s best for her, but is as afraid as he’s ever been of losing her.

“Thank you for the invitation,” she says, wrapping an arm around her boyfriend. “We may take you up on it someday. But for now, we belong in Arcadia Falls.”

Indra inclines her head.

“The offer stands,” she says, nodding also to Bellamy, and leaving as stealthily as she appeared.

“You’re really staying?” Bellamy asks, trying to remain cool despite his excitement. Octavia smirks and drops back down next to him.

“Well, I couldn’t make you move away from the library.”

* * *

All in all, the situation turned out better than Bellamy could have ever hoped for.

He quits his job in favor of taking over for the retiring librarian, promising himself that he’ll improve the aboveground collection and not spend _all_ his time adding to the supernatural one.

He gets a new front door and even adds a pet flap, which Octavia refuses to use on principle.

He even has an awesome girlfriend who genuinely likes him despite the fact that he talks back to his reading material, and gives as good as she gets when they’re teasing or bickering with each other.

Sure, his sister is a werewolf, but it’s not the end of the world.

He might still get nervous for her on the full moon, even though every month she has a stronger and stronger handle on her transitions; he might still nag her too much, might still take every opportunity to make a wolf joke, might still be adjusting to the fact that his life feels like something straight out of a bedtime story, but he can’t help it.

He’s only human.


End file.
